Lucy Jones ’76 stands in front of an elementary school in Pasadena,
California, imagining disaster. In her mind’s eye, she sees the roof
caving in, the mortar between the red bricks crumbling, the walls
collapsing on the kids out front doing cartwheels and on parents
greeting their sons and daughters after a day at school. People would
be severely injured by debris. Some might die. Whatever was left of the
building would perish in flames.

Brad Hines

Unassuming
but blunt, Lucy Jones has used her post at the United States Geologic
Survey to awaken the public to the risks posed by eartqquakes. In turn,
she's become a celebrity around Los Angeles known as the "Earthquake
Lady."

This is southern California’s unspoken fear: the prospect of a deadly
earthquake. San Rafael Elementary School, in the hills of Pasadena, was
built in 1918 atop the Eagle Rock fault, which the Southern California
Earthquake Data Center includes on its list of significant faults. (The
school plans to relocate over the next several years.) Jones, a
world-renowned statistical seismologist who works for the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS), has spent decades studying earthquakes. You
might say that dreaming up catastrophes is what she does for a living.
In television and newspaper interviews and at Los Angeles City Council
meetings, she warns that the city is woefully unprepared to deal with a
major earthquake. Then she lays out nightmare scenarios involving power
outages, crumbling buildings, car accidents, uncontrollable fires, a
lack of drinking water, and millions of people living in tents.

For her honesty and bluntness, she’s earned celebrity status in a
city of celebrities. Magazines call her the “Earthquake Lady.” Los
Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently said she’s “the face of
earthquakes in Southern California.” She receives both marriage
proposals and hate mail. “Los Angeles is home to many celebrities,”
Garcetti notes, “but in our time of greatest need, after an earthquake,
there is no greater, smarter, or more popular rock star than Dr. Lucy
Jones.”

People are finally beginning to heed Jones’s warnings. Last year,
she took on her most public role yet, after Garcetti charged her with
devising a plan to make L.A. more earthquake-resilient. The last major
Los Angeles earthquake having occurred 300 years ago, the city is
overdue for another big one. Such quakes, after all, typically occur
every 150 years. As a result, Jones, the mayor’s staff, and three
expert panels have proposed the largest public infrastructure program
in the city’s history: several billion dollars spent over thirty years
to reinforce buildings, fortify power and telecommunications lines, and
ensure the continued flow of water. Garcetti has pledged his full
support to the plan. If it’s implemented, Jones’s legacy may be to have
saved Los Angeles from total destruction.

The earth is not a stable place. Several million earthquakes happen
every year, though the vast majority are too weak to attract much
notice, or they happen in remote, wild areas or under the oceans. The
earth’s tectonic plates are moving all the time, their edges snagging
and breaking free, releasing a burst of energy that triggers a quake.

In 2008, Jones, along with a team of more than 300 academics,
published “The ShakeOut Scenario,” an exhaustive study of what would
happen to L.A. as a result of the inevitable major quake. Their
conclusion was that the city would be hit with more than 10,000
landslides, 1,800 fatalities, 50,000 injuries, 1,600 fires, and a $200
billion economic loss.

“The ShakeOut Scenario” dug deeper than any previous estimate,
looking at such things as how many serious car crashes there would be
as people fled the city and how long it would take to repair the
thirty-two aqueducts and thirty-nine natural gas and oil pipelines that
cross the San Andreas Fault. “It’s not that we’re all going to die,”
Jones says. “It’s just that we will be like [post-Hurricane Katrina]
New Orleans. No one will want to live here.”

Even “The ShakeOut Scenario” didn’t spur action. Real estate
developers balked at the high cost of retrofitting buildings and the
increased expense of erecting new ones. The city was unwilling to help.
Jones was entering her fifties when she started working on what would
eventually become “The ShakeOut Scenario.” Having authored more than
ninety scientific papers on earthquakes, she knew that taking action
soon was important. “I was thinking, ‘Do I write more scientific
papers, or do I get the science used in the real world?’” she says. She
chose the latter and eventually became the Earthquake Lady. “The
earthquake is inevitable,” she says, “but the disaster isn’t.”

An energetic woman, Jones can talk about earthquakes for literally
hours. “She sucks the air out of a room,” but in a good way, says Dale
Cox, a colleague at USGS. “She immediately starts engaging with the
ideas and has complete enthusiasm for the moment.”

In addition to her post at USGS, Jones is a visiting researcher at
the California Institute of Technology. I met with her in November at
her office on Caltech’s Pasadena campus. In keeping with her
approachable informality, she was dressed in a blue tie-dyed shirt. At
the time, she was busy preparing for the public release of her report
to Mayor Garcetti on the city’s lack of earthquake preparedness. She
said she was exhausted, but it didn’t show.

One of Jones’s first memories is of an earthquake. She was two years
old and living in Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. The quake
registered 5.2, and her mother took her and her two siblings into a
hallway and told them to cover their heads for protection. She then
placed herself on top of her children to shield them further. Jones
says she remembers the family’s Siamese cat shrieking.

Her father was an aerospace engineer, and, when she was seven, he
took her to his office and showed her the computer he was using. It was
an early mainframe, a massive machine. He showed her a program that
could compute prime numbers more quickly than any other he had seen.
“He was so excited with [its] elegance,” Jones recalls. “He was sure
his daughter would also enjoy it.”

Although her father encouraged her interest in math and science, her
high school guidance counselor told her, “You shouldn’t show you’re
good at math, because the boys won’t like you.” Even when she earned a
perfect score on a science aptitude test, the counselor assumed she had
cheated and made her take the exam again while she watched. Jones’s
score was still perfect.

“I was bored out of my mind in high school,” Jones says. She chose
to spend her senior year abroad with her aunt and uncle; he worked in
Taiwan as a China expert for the U.S government. The Taiwanese turned
out to be more encouraging to girls who loved science. Her math teacher
spotted her talent immediately. “You are too smart to be in this
class,” he told her. “I’m going to teach you separately.” She spent
that year doing college-level math.

Before she returned to California, her Taiwanese teacher had another
message for her: “It’s your filial responsibility to your family to do
as much as you can with the talent you’ve been given.” Several years
later, her grandmother agreed: “You’ve got your grandfather’s brains,”
she said. “Don’t waste them.” They were the last words she spoke to
Jones. She died a week later.

In 1972, Jones was accepted to Radcliffe, which had not yet merged
with Harvard. She resented being segregated from men and so chose
Brown, where Pembroke and the men’s college had already merged. One of
her teachers told her she was making a mistake; she would find a better
class of men at Harvard.

At Brown she concentrated in both Chinese and physics. By her
sophomore year she was the only female physics concentrator left. “Good
afternoon, lady and gentlemen,” her professor would say at the
beginning of every class. Jones liked that. “He was glad to have me
there,” she says.

Jones recalls that in her sophomore year, at a brunch with geology
professor Terry Tullis and several other faculty members, Tullis told
her, “Physicists make bombs. Geophysicists get to play in the mountains
and get paid for it.” That sounded good. Jones signed up for her first
geology class. Tullis, now a professor emeritus of geological sciences,
remembers that brunch differently. What he recalls saying is he knew of
several physicists who had ultimately found geophysics a more
interesting subject. In any case, Tullis says, “I was responsible for
getting Lucy into geophysics. That was one of the best contributions to
my field I will make in my scientific career.” Jones went on to earn a
geophysics PhD at MIT. She was the only woman in the program.

In 1985, now working for the USGS, which is part of the Department
of the Interior, Jones published the paper that would make her
reputation. No one could—and to this day can’t—predict when an
earthquake will strike. Jones wondered whether it would be possible to
predict the severity of the tremors that commonly follow an earthquake.
Knowing this would help government officials prepare the public.

Southern California Earthquake Center

Fault
lines run up and down near the Southern California coast, putting it at
constant risk of earthquakes. The southern segmnet of the San Adreas
fault, which runs close to Los Angeles, is capable of an 8.1 magnitude
earthquake.

Jones studied earthquakes that hit Southern California between 1932
and 1983. She found that, although a quake is followed by an even
stronger tremor 5 percent of the time, the risk is reduced with each
passing hour. Wait five days, and you can be pretty confident no
further quakes will happen. Jones’s calculations became the basis for
earthquake advisories. She became a regular fixture at press
conferences held after earthquakes, the USGS expert who spoke alongside
government officials. You can see her in video clips from the time, a
calm, precise, and authoritative presence facing a scrum of anxious
reporters yelling questions out at her. No matter how many times they
demand to know what’s going to happen next, she says she can’t tell
them. She can offer probabilities, she insists—not certainties.

Over time, journalists began to value her knowledge. While public
figures scramble to appear responsible and in charge, Jones offers up
scientific facts in an accessible way. “She stands alone in her ability
to explain the complicated technological dynamics of earthquakes in a
way the average individual can understand,” says Conan Nolan, a
reporter and anchor for KNBC-TV in Los Angeles who has covered Jones
for several decades. He says Jones has had the same impact on the
public’s understanding of earthquakes as Charles Francis Richter, who
invented the Richter scale in the early 1930s.

Jones was at work in 1992 when a medium-sized earthquake rattled the
desert about 100 miles east of Los Angeles. She briefed
emergency-response officials, but, when a second quake followed, she
found herself in the dual role of expert and mother. Her husband, Egill
Hauksson, an Icelandic-born seismologist at Caltech, had been called on
to deal with a high-level computer emergency there. He took with him
the couple’s two young children, Sven and Niels, and asked Jones to
look after one-year-old Niels while he cared for Sven. She addressed
the press with Niels in her arms. “He glowered at the cameras,” she
recalls, “but he didn’t scream.”

Throughout her career, Jones had never asked for special treatment
because of her gender. Suddenly she became a symbol of maternal comfort
during a time of crisis. She became “the earthquake mother,” says
KNBC’s Nolan. He says people watching the TV news thought, “It can’t be
too bad if she has a child in her arms.” Unexpectedly, she became a
feminist icon. Women saw her as a symbol of the working woman who could
easily care for her child at the same time. Jones wasn’t so sure. She
had felt she wasn’t spending enough time with her children and had in
fact been working at the USGS part-time, something she continued to do
until 2002, when her children were older.

In January 2014, Mayor Eric Garcetti asked Jones to become the Los
Angeles earthquake czar. She was appointed head of the Mayoral Seismic
Safety Task Force, a group of city officials and business
representatives charged with studying the city’s earthquake readiness
and making recommendations to improve it. “She’s the translator between
the science and politics,” says David Cocke, a structural engineer who
served with Jones on the task force. Jones kept her USGS job and
refused to take a salary for her city work. She wanted to make
decisions based solely on science and did not want the public to think
money or politics could shape her judgment.

The task force’s 126-page report, completed in December, called for
drastic changes. Two classes of buildings are particularly vulnerable
to earthquake damage: older concrete buildings and so-called
soft-first-story buildings, which are edifices with garages, large
windows, or any other feature that compromises their structural
integrity. Thousands of these buildings are scattered around Los
Angeles: apartment complexes, schools, hospitals, office buildings, and
warehouses, for example. Retrofitting them would require such measures
as reinforcing the connections between walls or adding additional
first-floor walls to provide more lateral strength.

Courtesy California State Archives

In
1906, San Fransisco was leveled by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, the
deadliest in U.S. history. Fires caused most of the damage, and
firefighters inadvertantly made things worse by setting off dynamite to
try to hault the inferno's spread.

In addition, the task force concluded that the fire department would
need a backup water system in case the water lines into the city were
ruptured. (Getting water to California is difficult under even the best
of circumstances.) The group also recommended building a solar-powered
wireless network to back up cell phone and digital service. Garcetti
said the report represented a “tectonic shift in how earthquake policy
is made in Los Angeles.” The LA Times said it contained “the most ambitious seismic safety regulations in California history.”

Not surprisingly, businesses are balking at the costs. Property owners
want to pass the retrofitting bills onto tenants. California may have
to issue a public bond, which would introduce state politics into the
equation. “As with most things,” says Cocke, the structural engineer,
“it’s going to come down to money.”

Jones, though, is undaunted. “Don’t let them say this won’t happen,” she says. “It is going to happen.”

With the city report finished, Jones must decide whether to continue
to be the Earthquake Lady or to focus full-time on her research. The
USGS’s Cox, who has worked with Jones for fifteen years, says she has
an introverted side that the public never sees. “She’s overcome it
because she is so passionate about protecting California from
earthquakes,” he says. But he’s seen her “go fetal after meeting so
many people. She needs to be alone and step away from the moment.”

In the meantime, Jones has returned to an old love: writing music.
She studied the cello as a child, but switched to the viola da gamba at
Brown, where she became part of a Renaissance music group. She put it
aside to devote herself to her career and to raising her children. Now
she’s playing and composing music again. Her latest composition deals
with climate change, correlating a rise in pitch with the increase in
the planet’s temperature over the last 130 years. As the piece
progresses, it rises three octaves. She plans to perform the piece with
fellow musicians this summer. “Making music around the theme is a
challenge,” she says, but adds that it’s yet another way to make
science resonate with the public. That is, after all, her greatest
passion.

Comments (6)

06/15/15

As a 35 year resident of L.A.'s South Bay Beach Cities, I can attest to the fact that when Lucy Jones speaks, Californians listen. Whenever that all too familiar, tremor induced media frenzy of politically motivated talking heads starts up here in Southern California, everyone eagerly awaits the transitional moment when Lucy Jones appears at the podium and commands our full attention. It's common knowledge that it is Lucy who delivers the science that is the true story, and she does it with a comforting blend of calmness, clarity, and certainty that cause her to stand out as the sole beacon of focused intelligence, at a time when we need it most.

We are also tremendously thankful that Lucy so kindly accepted Mayor Eric Garcetti' s wise request for her to head up efforts to make L.A. more earthquake ready. Lucy's noble decision to refuse a salary for this position is particularly commendable, and displays a most honorable return to higher operational standards that too many simply ignore, or even knowingly violate today.

And now Lucy is composing and playing music, with a creatively integrated theme of climate change, no less?!? Please let us know where in town you'll be performing this summer, Lucy - we'll be there with bells on!!

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05/17/15

Great article. So proud to count Lucy as colleague and fellow Brown grad.

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06/15/15

I love Brown University.

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06/15/15

Knew this amazing woman and her husband in the late 80s, watched Sven when he was a newborn at The CEC and home, while I was in college. Very down to earth family and yes, everyone listens when Lucy speaks!

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06/15/15

After the press event with Ms. Jones holding forth and holding her young child she was dubbed "Seismom."

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10/26/15

Dr. Jones has graciously agreed to present "Imagine America Without LA" - a talk based on the ShakeOut Scenario - to Brown Club of Orange County. We are so excited to be hosting this event November 11th for our local alumni community and for a variety of academics, students and interested folks who know of Lucy through her towering academic reputation. For more information, visit http://www.browncluboc.blogspot.com/

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